All Is Changing, Rapidly

These past days I’ve been socially negligent and professionally indolent while catching up on reading in rural France.

If you steer clear of mainstream headlines, you may find spellbinding news about the world.

We used to read articles that reviewed the year that just passed, and predictions about what might come next.

Although sometimes breathtaking, such information was generally comprehensible: NATO, say, would expand, or the dollar would strengthen, or a revolution would end, or NASA was assembling some new space probe.

Today reality is changing faster than ever before. The rate of change is climbing so steeply that much of what is taking place around us sounds like science fiction.

We’re also becoming so used to this that even bizarre incomprehensibility fazes few.

Instead of marveling at change, we talk about the price of diesel or the latest Netflix series.

Consider these realities:

• Amazon and Walmart have applied for patents for floating warehouses (like giant blimps in the sky) to help deliver their products faster.
• Future cars may be shaped like—well—anything; motorcycles may soon become obsolete.
• Robots in an existing million square foot warehouse will, within five years, eliminate the need for any warehouse workers.

• Russia has recently launched a nuclear power plant that floats on water.
• On New Year’s Day, the New Horizons space probe will visit Ultima Thule, a chunk of rock located 1.6 billion kilometers past Pluto, and will try to learn about events that occurred 4.6 billion years ago. *

• Agrivoltaics—where crops are grown below solar panels to increase land use efficiency by more than 60 percent—are spreading. **
• Some yachts will be 3-D printed.

• 3-D printed houses may cause the price of houses to plummet.
• As of 2018, the world’s largest producer of oil is not Saudi Arabia or Russia, but the USA.

• Most airfares have fallen since 2014.
• In 1965 Gordon E. Moore predicted that by 1975, each computer chip might contain 65,000 components. Today, any chip may have billions of components.
• According to the new Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6), enough new URL internet addresses have been created that 1 trillion of them could be assigned to each grain of sand on earth.

• All of the digital data created by humans in one year could be stored, in the future, on four grams of DNA, which would weigh about the same as eight paperclips.
• A single celled organism lives and replicates in underground conditions where the temperature remains at 250 degrees Fahrenheit, or 121 degrees Celsius—well above the boiling point of water. Talk about hot sex.

• The amount of life below the surface of the earth (and not on the earth, or in the oceans) is about 300 times the quantity of the biomass of all humans.
• In Venezuela prices double every 25 days, while the country’s economy shrunk by half in the past five years.***
• The percentage of the world’s population living in ‘extreme poverty’ was 40 percent in 1980. By 2015 it had dropped to less than 10 percent. ****

• The universe is expanding, and the rate of expansion is growing.
• 22 million scientific papers have been published in the last century. +

The world in which we live is changing, rapidly.

Strap in and get ready for a future you likely never dreamed of. Say a prayer that this will generally be positive.

Best wishes as you enter 2019—and thanks again for tuning in!

* Economist The World in 2019.

** Wired Magazine  UK edition Jan/Feb 2019: ‘Plants will Give us Power.’

*** Foreign Affairs; Nov/Dec 2018. ‘Venezuela’s Suicide.’

**** Foreign Affairs; Nov/Dec 2018. ‘Doomsday Delusions.’

+ Scientific American ‘Revolutions in Science.’ Fall, 2018